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The Art of Cruelty A Reckoning Maggie Nelson W.W. Norton: 304 pp., $24.95 From a movie billboard in her Los Angeles neighborhood to the Italian Futurists, Maggie Nelson swings her lively gaze across a century's worth of art and culture in "The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning." The starting point for this study of violence and art is Antonin Artaud, the French playwright behind the "theatre of cruelty" who wrote that cruelty in art "signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination." Those ideas fascinate Nelson, but they don't hold sway over her; she often brings up Buddhist thinking as a counterpoint, and...

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The Art of Cruelty
A Reckoning
Maggie Nelson
W.W. Norton: 304 pp., $24.95
From a movie billboard in her Los Angeles neighborhood to the Italian Futurists, Maggie Nelson swings her lively gaze across a century's worth of art and culture in "The...

PARIS - The Musee du Louvre is ornate, palatial and extremely large. The sprawling art museum on the Right Bank of the Seine River was one of our first stops on our Paris visit. It is home to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, the No. 1 attraction in the...

"Sublime Schubert" is what the Los Angeles Philharmonic is calling this week of Schubert and nothing but. The festival began at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Monday night with a performance of the most beloved song cycle, "Die Schöne...

The Hunger AngelA NovelHerta Müller, translated from the German by Philip BoehmMetropolitan Books/Henry Holt: 292 pp., $26Fortunately, the Nobel Prize committee for literature has gotten it right when it's recognized the courageous, sensual...